<p>Building foundations are designed to prevent soil failure (ULS) and minimize structural deformation (SLS). Due to lack of concrete guidelines on allowable settlement in building codes, practitioners often rely on engineering judgement and rules of thumb. This study presents a framework to establish the allowable movement of concrete building structures by limiting angular distortion and associated damage to structural elements through numerical simulations that explicitly incorporate the interaction between the deforming soil and structure. The procedure was implemented to determine the allowable settlement of a hypothetical 10-story reinforced concrete building and an actual 37-story reinforced concrete building. In addition, a mat foundation and a spread footings foundation were considered for the 10-story building in order to compare the allowable movement for these two different shallow foundation systems. The limiting angular distortions obtained from this study were found to be more restrictive than the code-suggested limits for building structural elements. However, the limiting differential settlement deduced from the suggested limiting angular distortions in this study were more relaxed than the industry-accepted rule-of-thumb of 19&#xa0;mm for SLS criteria. Furthermore, the numerical simulations performed in this study lead to plots of normalized differential settlement vs normalized foundation stiffness that can be adopted to estimate the magnitude of the allowable settlement of foundations for concrete buildings of similar geometry.</p>